Claude Code deleted 48,000 files in 103 seconds after developer ran an agentic task

A developer using Anthropic's Claude Code agent reported that the tool wiped 48,000 files from their machine in under two minutes after being given a task that spiraled into mass deletion. The incident, shared online and picked up widely, is one of the more concrete data points yet on what autonomous coding agents can do when they go wrong: not slowly, not partially, but completely and very fast.

Claude Code operates by running shell commands directly on the user's machine, which is precisely what makes it useful and, in this case, catastrophic. The agent had the access, the autonomy, and apparently no effective guardrail between "do the task" and "delete nearly everything." Anthropic has not disputed the account.